Building connections

The faculty of the University of Southern Indiana are at the heart of the University's mission: academic excellence and success for  students. It's this mission and goal that drove Dr. Amy Chan Hilton, Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and Professor of Engineering, to apply for grants with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to propel two of her current projects.

The work she and her collaborators have done has paid off, with NSF awarding one grant in October 2020 and a second in January 2022. Not only will these projects benefit faculty and students at USI, they will also benefit universities and colleges around the country.

Applying for NSF grants-in very competitive programs-made sense for Chan Hilton, as she knows first-hand how the award process works. "Before joining USI, I was a program officer at NSF, so I have experience with these particular programs that focus on STEM education," she explains.

"Capacity-Building for Transforming STEM Education Through Faculty Engagement in Data Analysis and Learning Communities," the first grant of $150,000 awarded in October 2020 (and ongoing until September 2022), is an internal USI project that addresses the needs of faculty in undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs. Chan Hilton and her project collaborators are doing this by focusing on "building capacity," which means they are looking at ways to strengthen and enhance the faculty community by helping them learn more about how they can support students in their STEM introductory classes.

"All of our students take STEM classes-it's not just our STEM majors. STEM courses reach more than just our students in those particular programs," says Chan Hilton. "This project is about exploring more, learning more and gaining better understanding of what some of the challenges and opportunities for improvement are and then figuring out what might be done."

For this project, Chan Hilton partnered with several other USI colleagues-Dr. Shelly Blunt, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of Chemistry; Dr. Zane Mitchell, Dean of the Pott College of Science, Engineering, and Education and Professor of Engineering; Dr. William Elliott, Chair of the Geology and Physics Department and Professor of Geology, and Dr. Katherine Draughon, Chief Data Officer (since retired from USI).

It doesn't stop at building faculty communities. Bringing in the Office of Planning, Research and Assessment (OPRA) allows the project members to create new data dashboards and tools that will be actionable by faculty. While the current tools offered to faculty members at USI are helpful, Chan Hilton says the new data dashboards this project looks to create will help instructors gain insights about their teaching in introductory and gateway classes, as well as explore how they might rethink their overall program to support student success.

The project also includes participating faculty in the design of these new data dashboards, giving them an opportunity to voice what data would be useful for their courses and teaching approaches. "We want faculty to be at the heart of this, because the faculty play such a key role," says Chan Hilton. "It's been really exciting. It's been a whole lot of fun because we're getting a lot of faculty to come together. So far, 17  members across six departments meet regularly in  communities to discuss student learning and retention issues that are meaningful to them."

Though the two grant proposals n  are separate,  Chan Hilton explains how exploring the ways faculty engage with institutional data ties them together. "Enhancing the Use of Institutional Data in Projects to Support Low-Income, High-Achieving Students in STEM: Capacity-Building Workshops," the $50,000 grant awarded in January, focuses on helping faculty across the country increase their confidence and skills with putting together proposals for STEM education grants. "I saw (during my time with NSF) what types of challenges faculty and teams had been encountering with one piece of the proposal, which has to do with pulling in institutional data about students to support their proposed projects," she says.

As the NSF funding program evolved, proposals submitted needed more data to demonstrate who their students were, and faculty faced challenges providing and making use of data regarding students majoring in STEM programs who come from low-income backgrounds and exhibit an academic talent or potential. The goal of this project is creating and offering workshops for faculty from large and small institutions, public and private, minority serving institutions and two-year colleges to strengthen their NSF proposals which seek to support these students to degree completion by providing both scholarship money and a variety of academic supports.

"That's really the reason why we came up with this particular workshop project, because we want to help students everywhere-certainly at USI, but everywhere-to have the opportunity to do well," she says. "And we want faculty who submit proposals to this specific NSF program, who are really passionate about supporting low-income students on their campus to improve their chances of a successful grant proposal."

Working with external collaborators across the country-including  Hope College in Michigan, West Chester University in Pennsylvania, Southern University Baton Rouge, Indiana University Bloomington, Shepherd University in West Virginia and Southwestern College in California-Chan Hilton has hosted two virtual workshops already with more than 40 participants from diverse institution types across the U.S. . So far, she's been happy with the response, but what makes the work even more special is the recognition the project brings to USI.

"This is an opportunity for USI to get in there and lead the way in faculty development with learning analytics. The ones more established in this area are large research institutions. Not many mid-sized schools like us have been jumping into this," she says.

As the work continues, Chan Hilton  is keeping the future in mind. The steps she and her colleagues are developing now are the spark that will ignite further community building and ideas generation between faculty members, as well as expanding data dashboards beyond the STEM program and using all of this to plan and implement improvements. These processes and lessons learned  will be shared with institutions everywhere, to benefit those universities focus on the most-students.

"We want our students who come to USI to be successful," says Chan Hilton. "I know everyone has their heart in that and has interest in seeing what else we can do."